Can You Swim Upstream In 2009? | Point of Sale Software by MerchantOS

Swimming Upstream In 2009

Justin Laing on January 1st, 2009.
Posted in News.

happy new year 2009

How Are You Going To Survive and Grow In 2009?

In general businesses are having a rough time. But there are always outliers, those who buck the trend and grow while others struggle. How are you going to survive and grow your business in 2009? Are you playing it conservative or trying a more aggressive strategy?

Here’s how MerchantOS plans to not only survive, but grow substantially in these turbulent economic times:

2008 A Year In Review For MerchantOS

Before you plan for the future it’s a good idea to assess how you’ve done in the past. How did MerchantOS do in 2008? Here are some core metrics:

Expanded from 130 retail locations to 276.
Our revenue doubled.
System usage grew from 900 logins/day to 1800 logins/day.
This website had 40k visitors.
We updated the system 30 times.
The founders (me and Ivan) got paid a livable wage for the first time in 4 years

MerchantOS Plans For 2009

We’ve got a lot of planned for 2009. Part of our strategy is to keep improving our core point of sale and inventory control product. You (our customers) have given us tons of suggestions for ways we can better meet your business needs. Here’s a few improvements to our core product we plan to make:

Color / Size (or Attribute) Matrix – so you can quickly take stock of your apparel and other products that come in various colors/sizes/styles.
More Vendor Integration – we want to integrate with more vendors so it’s easier for you to order product.
Better discounts and pricing options – so you can more easily set sales, define discounts, and generally manage your product pricing.
Many more incremental improvements – we are always taking suggestions and looking for ways to improve the system. We want to make sure our system keeps becoming easier to use and at the same time more powerful.

We also have some big plans for new directions:

Ecommerce

The first is Ecommerce. We’ve been working on this for a while, and running our own Ecommerce store on our new system. We are starting to open this up to customers. We’re going to keep improving it and working out the bugs. Soon we’ll open it up so all of you can get a website and online store that is integrated with your point of sale and inventory.

Global Product Catalog and Reviews

We want to create a giant product catalog that contains all the products in the industries we target. With the products cross referenced between vendors/suppliers so you can see who you can order a certain product from and at what price. We are going to add the ability to write reviews of products in this catalog, so you can share your opinions on products with other business owners. This catalog is going to be as content rich as we can make it – with pictures, long descriptions of items, reviews, where to buy these products, sales statistics, and more. We’re going to do our best to pre-populate this information with data we’ve collected from vendors and manufactures. But we also are going to rely on you to help us fill in the gaps. You’ll be helping yourself and the whole community – and benefiting from the same effort by others.

Employee and Community Communication and News

We think it’d be great if you could more easily broadcast information to your employees right inside of MerchantOS. Along side of that we have some ideas about how shops in the same industry could share news and advice with each other.

growing our business in hard times

Growing In Hard Times: Our Plan

Invest In Our Core Product

We put the vast majority of our time and energy into continually improving our core product/service: point of sale and inventory control.

Develop New Products

By developing new products and services we hope to expand to new customers. Ecommerce and the Product Catalog I mentioned are the main thrusts of this strategy for the next year.

A Long Term Marketing Strategy

A Great Product and Service Is Easy To Sell – Our main marketing strategy has and will always be to make a great product and provide excellent customer service to go along with it. This is what we spend 80%+ of our time and energy doing. The other 20% is:
Search Engine Marketing – We are making a significant long term investment in search engine marketing, that means both paid advertisements on terms that are relevant (example: type in “bike shop software” in Google and you’ll see our ad), and search engine optimization.
Community Building – As discussed above we have some ideas about how to create more of community among you (our customers). We’ve always had good communication between us and our customers, now we want to start building communication between customers. For starters we’ve created a:
MerchantOS Facebook Company Page
MerchantOS Facebook User Group
MerchantOS Twitter Profile
Word Of Mouth – That’s You! – Since we’ve created a great product and provided excellent service, we’re counting on you to tell other business owners about it. Help us grow and we’ll keep re-investing in making the product and service you use better.

Happy New Year 2009!

What are your plans for 2009? How can we help make your business more successful?

What do you want to see from MerchantOS in 2009?
What about MerchantOS is a pain in the #!*%?
Have a big idea you think we should do?

We thrive on your input. So let us have it. We want to be the best possible product/service for your business and we can only do that with your help.

About MerchantOS Point Of Sale

MerchantOS is a point of sale and inventory control system. It keeps track of all your sales, customers, inventory, purchase orders, work orders, and more. It's got all the features you'll need to manage your retail business packaged in an easy to use and intuitive design.

How does MerchantOS improve my business?

Fast and efficient point of sale. Quickly handle special orders, layaways, work orders, deposits, refunds, store credits, gift cards, credit card transactions and more. All from the point of sale without making the customer wait.
Inventory control - we pre-load supplier catalogs for you. This makes creating a purchase orders easy because you don't have to type in product descriptions.
Real time in-stock information allows you to check to see if you have an item in stock or back ordered from anywhere. This information is updated in real time as sales are made and inventory is checked in.
Customer relations management. We keep track of all your customers, their purchase history, special orders, layaways, work order history, credit accounts, gift cards, and more!
When a customer comes in asking about that special order you'll be able to give them fast and accurate information.
Work Orders and service management. Create a work order for the customer and track it to completion. Lookup previous work orders for the customer.
There are many more features in MerchantOS but the most important is ease of use. It won't take you long to get comfortable with the system and if you do need help we are a phone call or email away.

Ready To Streamline Your Business?

1. Try Out Our Demo

2. Sign Up For A 30-Day Free Trial

or Call (866) 554-2453 to speak with us about your business.

Randall Vaughn
January 18th, 2009 at 1:25 pm

I am considering using Merchant POS for my new retail store. I need to be able to manage my online store’s inventory and the physical store’s inventory in sync; all of the inventory’s units will be in low #’s (although price points will be common), so it has to be easily changed; online product images, etc. I am consdering having the store on amazon.com….

Ivan Stanojevic
January 21st, 2009 at 9:13 am

Hi Randall, We are just now coming out with e-commerce which is tightly integrated with our point of sale system. You can upload images and control how all your items look online in the point of sale system. All transactions and inventory adjustments happen instantly between the point of sale and e-commerce systems. You can check out an e-commerce enabled demo here http://www.merchantos.com/merchantos_com_demo.php and you can see the e-commerce site managed by it here http://demo.merchantos.com/. If you have any additional questions or need help you can call us at 866 554 2453.

David
October 12th, 2009 at 6:56 pm

Hi Ivan –

does your “e-commerce module” come with each plan? what is the current dev status or feature list of e-commerce for merchantos? I dig what you all have done, and love the function key type quick access, and thinking around a real retail environment that makes sense for catalog or mail order as well…

and could i use merchantos and integrate with my own web shopping cart app or any of the myriad of carts out there, so your POS + outside ecommerce cart etc.?

thx

David

David
October 12th, 2009 at 7:25 pm

Ok I found more info on your “retail ecommerce” etc.

So, my question now also is we use Expression Engine (PHP) as our CMS. I see you are seemingly pretty tightly coupled to Wordpress. How can we integrate? Is there some basic way through an API or something?

Has anyone setup their own store outside wordpress yet still nicely tied together with your POS?

Ivan Stanojevic
October 13th, 2009 at 8:38 am

Hi David,

We have very recently discontinued development of our e-commerce module. We will be integrating with Shopify and Magento very shortly. We will also have an API so that you can integrate our point of sale system with any other shopping cart that is able to be integrated. The API will probably come out a bit after our first two integrations are complete.

David
October 13th, 2009 at 10:11 am

Gotcha, thanks for the info. Shopify is cool, being a RoR app and subsequent ease with “web hooks”, should make it easier to tie your impressive POS to a solid front end.

On the php framework side, using codeigniter, keep an eye on shopigniter, from Cularis Store folks. Stands to be the coolest ecom front end in some time, with its social lead generation monitoring concepts etc.

That being said, those folks are real smart in that they always promoted the idea of real time updates to a POS vs. replicating everything and not offering the robustness or features like purchase orders etc. that a solid POS just does clearly and business like.

http://www.cularis.com/

You should get them to tie to merchantos, as from all my analysis, it is equal or better than the ones they indicate they tie to in their little graphic on their homepage on the bottom right…

So, is there any way to begin using merchantos now and somehow real time get data in or out with an outside ecom cart or other apps?

thanks

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